


Wrought a Good Work

by TiamatsChild



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Community: makinghugospin, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-02
Updated: 2013-08-02
Packaged: 2017-12-22 05:05:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/909257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TiamatsChild/pseuds/TiamatsChild
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For Fantine, it's personal.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wrought a Good Work

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a prompt on makinghugospin @ Livejournal: “Footkink.”

The light in Monsieur Madeleine's infirmary was always beautiful. Fantine didn't know why – she had lived in buildings with long windows and white-washed walls before, and she did not remember that the light in them was so beautiful, so it could not be those two things alone. She was always glad to wake to this light.

To this light and to M. Madeleine's breathing, strong and quiet and slow. When she was better, when she was well, Fantine thought in the warm haze that bounds the edge of sleep, she would wake to that breathing and match her own to it. She couldn't now. She would cough too hard if she tried. But when she was better. It was tempting now. But when she was better.

Strong and quiet and slow. 

She opened her eyes and smiled at him.

He smiled back. 

Monsieur Madeleine sat on the straight backed wooden chair beside her bed, his hands folded on his knees, his eyes on her face. 

“I was just thinking about the light,” Fantine told him. “I suppose I must like it because everyone here is kind, and so it seems the light is too.”

M. Madeleine reached out and took her wrist, finding her pulse without searching, the way he was coming to do. “May I do something for you?” he asked. 

Fantine breathed carefully, as deeply as she could, so that her heart would be quiet and strong. “Yes,” she said. 

“I think that makes sense,” M. Madeleine said, as he let go her wrist and turned his hand to hold hers. “Places are like the people who inhabit them.”

“So the light can be like the place and the people,” Fantine answered.

Madeleine smiled. 

“Do you like my pulse, monsieur?” Fantine asked him, smiling back, looking at him sidelong and up through her lashes. 

“The Doctor left an ointment for your feet,” M. Madeleine said, which was not an answer, but Fantine readily forgave him, without needing him to ask. “If I may I thought I might put it on for you.”

“I'd like that,” Fantine said, and they smiled at each other. 

 

Fantine regretted agreeing when Madeleine left the room to fetch a basin. That hadn't occurred to her, although it should have. She didn't want him to leave, she wanted to see him, she wanted him to be with her, she wanted more of his time than she should want. She'd already slept through some of his visit. He'd been early. Did that mean he needed to leave early? He was such a busy man. Everyone wanted him and she mustn't be greedy, she mustn't be, she needed to be good.

She would be good. She folded her hands and concentrated on not clenching them against each other. It occurred to her that she was holding her breath and that the Doctor had asked her not to do that the day before yesterday as M. Madeleine came back in. 

Fantine felt herself light up as she saw him. It was a curious feeling, the inside out awareness of what Simplice read in her face. She felt as though she was a lamp, and M. Madeleine brought the match in the form of his presence. Something in her answered him. 

She held out her hand. He set the basin on the floor, and took it, answered the gentle pressure of her squeeze with his own – infinitely kind. “May I help you up?” he asked. 

“If you would, Monsieur,” she answered. 

 

If it had been a matter purely of his inclination, rather than of the available resources, Fantine felt quite sure that M. Madeleine would have piled pillows so deep about her that they might be mistaken for a saint's throne in an icon. As it was, he'd helped her to the edge of the bed and settled the bolsters about her so cunningly that she barely needed any effort to sit up. 

It was marvelous, how cool and clean and smooth the bare floor was on her bare feet. She flexed her toes, watching them, and so she was startled when she met M. Madeleine's eyes. He knelt on the floor in front of her, and his face was so serene that silence swept her, held her, brought her tongue to the back of her teeth and left it there. “All right?” he asked, and she nodded, more because the light in him was, like the light in his infirmary, beautiful, than because she had a very clear notion what he was actually asking. 

No one had ever washed her feet before. Of course she had been a child, but she had not been a child with parents. She was no one's but the rain and wind's. Or rather, she thought, she had been someone's child but they had not kept her. Could not, she told herself, the way she had long told herself. It had been a famine year that year she was most probably born. There were families and there were times when it seemed like a child had a better chance on the street. 

She had not expected him to kneel. She had not thought how big his hands would be about her feet – she was a small woman, and illness had made her smaller. She had not thought that the way he circled his thumb about the bony knob of her ankle, soothing the big muscle there, would force her to swallow against – something.

Because it was personal to him. Of course it was personal to her, how could it not be? But it was personal to him too, and the person he touched was, she felt in the kindness of his touch, the balance between delicacy and confidence, a person he esteemed. She was. 

She made a noise, although she had not meant to, although she had intended quite the opposite. 

He looked up to her, to see her, no doubt to know if she was all right, if he was hurting her, and she saw that he was crying. There was water on his face. Tear tracks, shining with salt. 

She reached out to him, and he turned his face into her hand, kissed her palm as though he were a pilgrim. 

“Monsieur,” she said, because she could not say nothing. 

M. Madeleine smiled at her, as if he were not still crying. “I'm all right,” he said. And then, as though it were to himself, so much so that Fantine was not certain she heard it, because it was a strange thing to say, and like many of the strange things that they said to each other, she suspected she was not meant to take note of it, he said, “The ointment isn't perfume, but it will do.”

And that was such a curious thought – M. Madeleine, the suppliant sinner, when she had readily forgiven him what he did not know. M. Madeleine, her good Monsieur, imagining himself the woman who wept that she brushed back the hair from his eyes and said nothing, nothing at all.


End file.
